A planes is de-iced before takeoff at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Sunday. (AP Photo/The Star Tribune, Brian Peterson)

(Newser)
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When a blizzard the size of this week's arrives on the scene, air travel is going to suffer. But Nate Silver points out something else that's contributing to the slow recovery: airlines are flying with more passengers these days. Through September, "load factors on domestic flights—essentially the percentage of available seats that they filled—ran at 82%, the highest figure since the Department of Transportation began tracking the statistic," writes Silver at his FiveThirtyEight blog. That's up from 70% a decade ago.

It matters because at the 70% figure, "there are 2.3 passengers for every available seat, which means, roughly speaking, that one day’s worth of cancellations might take two days to clear through the system," writes Silver. At 80%, figure about four or five days to get all the passengers home.

The 82% figure is a bit misleading. Many flights are 100% full, while others are about 1/3 empty, depending on flight departure times and destinations. The popular flights and routes, particularly those which fly out of NYC to major cities are aften fully booked, which means it will take even longer to clear the backlog of stranded passengers. What a mess... so glad I stayed close to home for the holidays this year.

HMunster

Dec 28, 2010 2:37 PM CST

The reason that the percentage of filled seats on airlines is at "82%, up from 70% a decade ago" is that airlines have decreased the number of flights-to-passengers ratio as a cost saving measure...